2nd Phase Livestock & Fish CRP concepts
Initial PPMC Brainstorming, 8 December 2014, Kampala
SCENARIO 1: Continuation of Phase 1 Concept
Under this scenario, the original scope of the L&F CRP around sustainable intensification for food and
nutritional security through pro-poor transformation of animal-source food value chains is maintained.
The current basic portfolio of Flagships is continued, with some adjustments to reflect our ambitions to
expand work on environmental and nutritional dimensions. This will require a larger budget, but will
need to acknowledge the challenges in securing adequate bilateral funding for the work at value chain
level. Same set of CGIAR and non-CGIAR partners, with strong emphasis on recognizing regional and
national partners as part of the proposal.
Technology platforms:
Flagship 1: Animal health
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Still need clear impact-driven focus about enabling farmers to reduce losses and improve public
health
Clearer balance on shorter and longer term product lines
Flagship 2: Animal genetics
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Impact-driven focus around understanding sources of ‘yield gap’ while continuing to raise levels
of genetic potential
Clearer balance on shorter and longer term product lines
Flagship 3: Feed & forages for productivity and environmental benefits
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Better use of feed and forages (feed technologies, uptake and business development strategies),
while also continuing to generate better feeds and forages
EMPHASIS: Technologies and systems analysis to address GHG and land use trade-offs
Flagship 4: Pro-poor agri-ASF systems
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Other technical and institutional opportunities to improve post-farm efficiency, add value and
improve distribution of benefits
Gender and youth
Enabling policy environments
EMPHASIS: Improving access and use of ASF to enhance nutritional security
Delivery platform:
Flagship 5: Value chains transformation and scaling
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Improving understanding of value chain entry points for improving productivity and efficiency
and addressing pro-poor objectives
Testing innovations to support inclusive business models
Strategies for taking to scale
Refining the whole value chain approach, identifying and upgrading bottlenecks,
focusing on all nodes in the value chains and market integration; accelerate progress on
innovation validation and value chain upgrading
Adopting a more demand-driven (consumer-oriented) approach for food and nutrition
security
Promoting inclusive business models as basis for identifying needs and opportunities to
support business strategy and technology development both pre- and post-production
By the poor and/or for the poor, working with both poor and non-poor value chain
agents; clearer messaging re. flexibility on how outcomes are generated “for the poor”
and “by the poor”; working with non-poor value chain actors will also help poor actors;
engaging smallholders as well as small and medium-size commercialized/
commercializing enterprises; engaging more with the commercial actors in the value
chains in order to go to scale and sustain the interventions; investments in upgrading
SMEs; engage more with SMEs for upgrading
Multi-disciplinary analysis including biological and social science focus on value chain
dynamics; engaging with discovery research flagships/platforms in a two-way learning
process
Strengthening the CRP role as a knowledge partner and broker
Building on previous CGIAR work on innovation systems both to:
o Explore variants of multi-stakeholder innovation platforms to identify the right
issues to be addressed via action research; strengthened public-private
partnerships and collaboration; gender responsive innovation
o Open a dedicated AR4D effort on scaling: how to design effective dissemination
and stakeholder engagement strategies and capacity building as the basis for
scaling
What types of market, policy, and institutional interventions are required to support
interventions and improve value chain performance while enhancing / maintaining
environmental sustainability
SCENARIO 2: Consolidated Livestock & Fish Research Agenda
This scenario would better rationalize and manage the CG capacity and agenda for livestock and fish
technology research by consolidating it in a single CRP. This would address some of the gaps identified
by the ISPC White Paper on Livestock Research, while unifying capacity that has been divided and
sometimes fractured, diluted or disconnected across multiple CRPs. The CRP would target a shared
primary contribution to the nutrition security and poverty reduction SLOs (consistent with the argument
for sharing the ‘productivity increase’ IDO across both SLOs). The overarching objective would be to
focus our science on ensuring the sustainability of animal source foods as a critical component of better
diets and nutrition for the poor, by using resources more efficiently and sustainably to support the role
that animals play across the spectrum from extensive to intensive systems in supporting livelihoods and
nutritional security. Key aspects would include:
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Consolidating CGIAR animal research capacity to optimize synergies and focus
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Highlighting the need to realize the potential of ASF for improving nutritional well-being and as
an essential part of diversified, balanced diets going forward, generating the analysis and
evidence as well as the technologies and strategies to achieve this
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Enhancing the main source of ASF currently, which tends to be local (regional) production in
smaller-scale production systems and wet markets, to respond to the rapidly increasing demand
for ASF, and to do so in way the facilitates a smooth process of increasing specialization for
some and transition out of agriculture for many.
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Viewing the use of animal agriculture as a continuum from extensive low or no-input/low output
systems –often occurring in the same geographical area--where livestock have multiple uses
(food, traction power and transport, insurance and financial assets, manure, by-products (skins))
to intensive high-input/high-output systems mostly focused on commercial food production.
Across all of these systems, the challenge is to increase efficiency and sustainability, whether in
using fragile natural resources in extensive systems or in using purchased inputs and minimizing
negative externalities in intensive systems. So there is a mix of common and specific constraints
across this continuum that would benefit from a consolidated animal research capacity.
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At the same time, we understand that our target production and marketing systems and
consumer groups are dynamic and evolving, and an explicit objective is to anticipate and
facilitate transitions that converge to social and environmental optimums, in terms of diets, in
terms of sustainable use of resources, in terms of social transformation associated with
structural transformation and people gradually moving out of agriculture.
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Achieving an appropriate balance of longer-term and shorter-term research with clear
objectives, outputs and outcomes within both the CRP funding cycle and its longer-term horizon
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Continued emphasis given to working in more effective partnership with local A4RD partners
having shared objectives, and developing a joint agenda with a few strategic global partners
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Continued emphasis on nurturing a more effective partnership between research and
development actors (which include private sector!), including creating an innovative interface
that experiments with how the two can be linked to the benefit of both
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Renewed effort to design processes to align CRP priorities and activities with those of regional
and national authorities
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To continue enhancing the relevance and impact-orientation of the CRP research agenda, a
focus is maintained on selected sites where research is conducted to understand constraints,
identify opportunities, test solutions and learn about scaling, and where research and
development outcomes of the program can be measured and evaluated. The CRP will work in
two types of sites that encompass the continuum of contexts described above: (1) where
livestock have multiple uses and so the CRP will integrate into selected Systems CRPs’ sites to
provide the animal agriculture dimension; and (2) where intensification is the focus in the
selected ASF value chains.
The CRP remains structured as discovery and delivery Flagship Projects:
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ASF Production Systems: Three technology platforms focused on the primary productivity
drivers:
o animal health (including public health?)
o animal genetics
 Genetics approaches adapted to feedings systems in smallholder environments
(e.g., drought, resilience)
 Include agenda on poultry genetics
 Work on fish strains with emphasis of efficiency and resilience (including
adaptation to climate change) of selected fish strains
 Cold tolerance in fish
 Genetic basis for micronutrients in small fish
o animal nutrition (which includes feed and forage research)
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Feed platform including the application of novel technologies at different scales
e.g. application of TechFit for implementing adapted feed technologies at
smallholder level, utilization of mobile NIRS for feed selection/ranking ….
Utilization of 2nd generation biofuel technologies to enhance nutritive quality of
(poor quality) feeds
Addressing feed parameters for a) GHG mitigation (e.g. feed quality, genetic
characteristics such as Biological Nitrification Inhibition, carbon accumulation
capacity) and b) adaptation to climate change (vulnerability for drought and
waterlogging)
Development of fodder and double purpose feeds (e.g. feed quality of crop
residues)
Continued and amplified development of forage germplasm including biotic and
non-biotic stresses (e.g. drought, excess water, low soils fertility; salt
tolerance?)with an emphasis of amplified forage grass breeding including
application of novel genetic tools
Attention to relation of feeding with human nutrition with focus on replacing
current feeds with feeds of greater resource use efficiency (e.g. insects, cassava
wastes)
Processing of feeds
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ASF Agri-food Systems Sustainability: A more social sciences-based research platform—but
with components of food technology, human nutrition, public health--that tackles other
technical and institutional aspects of enhancing the contribution of animal agriculture in
extensive systems and developing pro-poor ASF value chains, including systems and economic
analysis for impact assessment and targeting, environmental analysis, gender, value chain
economics and business models, off-farm value addition, innovation systems and policy analysis,
and public health and human nutrition. This flagship works toward an integrated approach—
adopting a systems approach-- to pro-poor transformation of value chains, while strengthening
disciplinary capacity. It focuses its work in the CRP sites to improve the likelihood of impact, but
at the same time capturing lessons across sites and globally as global public goods that provide
evidence of benefits and trade-offs from productivity enhancing technologies and systems
transformation at local (target site) and global level.
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Methodologies for targeting for ASF production and food system technologies
(matching breeds, technologies and transformative processes with the
production environment (at low level of resolution); prioritization, what to do
where to get largest impact incl. supply channels (rural-rural, rural-urban, etc.)
Methodologies to assess sustainability of technologies and viability of food
systems
o Assessment of nutritional (food) security contributed by ASF systems at
household (rural and urban consumers) and national level
o Economic assessment
o Environmental assessment (climate, potential for adaptation and mitigation,
LCA)
o Equity assessment (social structures, gender transformative approaches,
employment opportunities, )
o Modeling of trade-offs in animal production systems (ecological, economic
and social sustainability)
Foresight and policy modeling, impact assessment
o to assess impact of changes in trade, economic, ecological and policy drivers
(e.g. climate change) at global and national level on future sustainability
(resilience) of ASF systems and possible uptake of productivity enhancing
technologies
o ex-ante modeling to predict benefits and trade-offs for best-bet
interventions
Methodologies and interventions to increase ASF quality and avoid food wastage
Transforming Systems and Scaling: This is the delivery Flagship where the program focuses its
effort to assess problems, test solutions, develop interventions and take to scale. This continues
the effort to improve our capacity to work in an interdisciplinary mode to create and improve
synergies across disciplines, to inform and improve the relevance and urgency of the research
agenda undertaken in the discovery Flagships, and to provide a shared ‘field laboratory’ where
commitments can be made to produce outcomes and achieve impact. Two sets of sites are
envisaged: (1) taking responsibility for injecting the animal dimensions within the Systems CRPs’
sites to address the multiple uses of animals in their focus agricultural systems; and (2)
continuing the focus on achieving inclusive and sustainable ASF agri-food systems in selected
value chains. Strong emphasis is given to working closely with development partners and
developing appropriate business models
o All of the value chain-related features listed under Scenario 1.
o Strategies specific to integrating animal-focused interventions within the Systems CRPs
o Develop a mechanism within the CRP that demonstrates a dedicated capacity and
investment to linking more dynamically and effectively into the work in the System
CRPs’ sites.